Women and Children First

Helping break away from abuse.
For years, a woman this writer willcall Beverly thought the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband was explainable. "Ah, he's under stress. Ah, it's work," she remembers telling herself. "He's going to cool down. Everything's going to be all right."
But when Beverly's daughter told a relative that her father had abused her and Beverly heard about it, a switch flipped in her mind. "That opened up the door for me to leave," she said. Beverly saw the abuse not from her own perspective — as someone who had grown up in a home where abuse had been normalized and kids "walked on eggshells" to avoid a man's rage — but from her daughter's. "And once you start seeing certain...